Painting up my Dark Vengeance Starter Set

I’ve had the DV Starter Set since the first Limited Edition release in 6th Edition; after picking it up, I promptly cleaned and assembled everything, primed the Dark Angels – and left it all sitting in the box since.

While working on Home Renovations lately, I had to come face-to-face with just how MANY unpainted models I own; I haven’t actually totaled it up, but I think 400 is a conservative estimate. I decided it was time to remedy that, and start painting up a lot of larger groups of models at a Better-than-Tabletop standard – something I can live with, but won’t take 4 hours a model to complete.

Because I’d like to be able to do introductory games with people in the near future, I decided the Starter Set was a great place to start knocking down the list of unpainted minis.

So far, I’ve completed the Tactical Marines and Cultists, as well as the Terminator Captain and one Chaos Chosen that was a colour test. The remaining Terminators and the Ravenwing models are close to complete as well.

I’ve been drawn to the Soul Drinkers Marine chapter for a while, and decided to use their colour scheme as inspiration, despite the fact that these are in fact Dark Angels.

The colours for the Cultists were chosen to be reminiscent of the Thousand Sons, who’ve always been my favourite CSM minis. At some point I’d like to create a Thousand Sons-themed army, though I’d probably use Beastmen for the Cultists in that case, as they live on the Planet of Sorcerers in large numbers.